bugGNU roff - Bugs: bug #62494, [grotty] Remap ~ and ^ to their...

 
 

bug #62494: [grotty] Remap ~ and ^ to their ASCII equivalents

Submitter:  John Gardner <alhadis>
Submitted:  Fri 20 May 2022 05:34:14 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  Driver grotty Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  Feature change Status:  Rejected
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  gbranden
Open/Closed:  Closed Planned Release:  None
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Thu 18 Aug 2022 10:26:32 AM UTC, comment #7: 

No yelling was forthcoming.  Closing as "Won't Fix".

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Sun 29 May 2022 10:55:28 AM UTC, comment #6: 

I should like to retract my comments #1 and #3.

They were wrong because the mappings i quoted were never device-independent.  For example, in PDF output, the five input characters in question never mapped to ASCII output characters, so using them for this purpose was always wrong even while the remapping for the UTF-8 output device existed.

What remains in this ticket is the discussion about the tilde and the caret.  Sorry for hijacking it with a discussion about hyphen-minus and apostrophes/quotes.

Ingo Schwarze <schwarze>
Group Member
Fri 27 May 2022 06:08:57 PM UTC, comment #5: 

I've pushed a commit that is responsive to this ticket, but I won't claim that it resolves it.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=915a878038236769eb072f728389352c1da88719

I guess I'll have to close this one as "Wont Fix" (sic), but I'll leave it open for people to yell at me some more first.


G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Fri 27 May 2022 04:18:30 PM UTC, comment #4: 

Further discussion of this is taking place on the email list: see http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2022-05/msg00052.html and the chain of "[Next in Thread]" links from there.

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Fri 20 May 2022 09:00:22 PM UTC, comment #3: 

I had almost given up hope, but maybe we can still get these particular changes for these five input glyphs reverted?  It looks like they are more controversial than people thought, and John's suspicion that the number of complaints will only grow once a wider audience is exposed to them via a groff release seems very plausible to me.

P.S.
John, don't be ashamed of missing the discussion in the past.  Branden is doing huge amounts of very good work, and i doubt that anybody is able to scrutinize the details of all of it.  With that amount of work, it isn't surprising that even aspects that do get discussed are occasionally overlooked by some active members of the community.

Ingo Schwarze <schwarze>
Group Member
Fri 20 May 2022 07:57:17 PM UTC, comment #2: 

comment #1:

> It also puts additional stress on manual page writers, who are often programmers with no particular interest in typesetting


That argument also goes both ways: programmers with an interest in typesetting should know better than to seek typographic integrity in a low-resolution, character-based display. Terminal fonts are less likely to have decent-looking glyphs for "fancy" punctuation than fonts designed for high-resolution output (e.g., print, web, PDFs, etc). Take macOS's default terminal font (Menlo):

Glyph comparison in macOS's Terminal.app


> ASCII 0x27 -> U+0027 apostrophe
> ASCII 0x60 -> U+0060 grave


Pleasing-looking quotes are a nice-to-have, but between fancier apostrophes and code samples that can be copy+pasted without the user needing to make corrections… I’ll take the latter. 😉

> Unfortunately, when i said this in the past, Branden strongly opposed my argument and not many others spoke up at all.


I regret not being present for the discussion. :/ This is certainly something I should've weighed in on.

John Gardner <alhadis>
Fri 20 May 2022 06:16:16 PM UTC, comment #1: 

Indeed.  I said before, and will say again in this context, that i would prefer keeping these mappings in manual pages (i won't type any punctuation characters here for fear that the weird Savannah web interface might mangle stuff):

input -> output

ASCII 0x27 -> U+0027 apostrophe
ASCII 0x2d -> U+002D hyphen-minus
ASCII 0x60 -> U+0060 grave
ASCII 0x7e -> U+007E tilde
ASCII 0x5e -> U+005E circumflex

and not U+2018, U+2010, U+2019, U+02DC, U+02C6
like in general-purpose roff typesetting.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record:
The reason simply is that this is what manual page authors and maintainers have become used to during the last two decades and that very large numbers of manual pages are written expecting this.  So "fixing" this to conform to general-purpose roff typesetting conventions unavoidably breaks huge amounts of real-world manual pages.  Some large corpusses (e.g. the OpenBSD base system) will eventually get fixed (even though that amounts to a horrific and not very useful make-work project for myself), but i expect in most other code bases, this will remain broken for many years to come, if not for decades.  It also puts additional stress on manual page writers, who are often programmers with no particular interest in typesetting and who will have to learn this as a new and rather counter-intuitive rules, which will add to the dislike that some feel for editing documentation and keeping it up to date in the first place.

Unfortunately, when i said this in the past, Branden strongly opposed my argument and not many others spoke up at all.

Ingo Schwarze <schwarze>
Group Member
Fri 20 May 2022 05:34:14 PM UTC, original submission:  

In Groff 1.22.4, tildes and carets are respectively rendered in man pages as ~ and ^. Since then, there appears to have been a regression of sorts: -Tutf8 now renders tildes and carets as ˜ and ˆ.

Now, I understand that this is the intended behaviour; groff_char(7) does a commendable job of explaining the seven oddballs of Groff's character set. However, folks aren't used to seeing stuff like ˜/.curlrc or /ˆ.*/ in their man pages, so unless the original behaviour is restored by the next release, users are going to complain about "mangled" man pages after upgrading to Groff 1.23.0…

John Gardner <alhadis>

 

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Attached Files
file #53237:  glyph-comparison.png added by alhadis (21KiB - image/png)

 

Depends on the following items: None found

Items that depend on this one: None found

 

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    Follow 5 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2022-10-07 gbranden CategoryDriver - others/general Driver grotty
    2022-08-18 gbranden StatusNone Rejected
        Assigned toNone gbranden
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2022-05-20 alhadis Attached File- Added glyph-comparison.png, #53237

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